Background and objectives: Hospitals with high complex oncologic surgical volume have improved short-term outcomes. However, for long-term outcomes, the influence of other therapies must be considered. We compared effects of resection with other therapies on long-term outcomes across U.S. hospitals.
Methods: We examined claims in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER)-Medicare dataset for patients with esophageal (EC) and pancreatic (PC) cancers between 2005-2009, with follow-up through 2011, performing multivariable Cox proportional hazards analyses. We stratified hospitals by volume and compared rates of treatments in the context of survival.
Results: We studied 905 EC and 3,293 PC patients at 138 and 375 hospitals, respectively. For EC, resection rates were significantly higher (32.9% vs. 9.5%, P < 0.001) in the highest versus lowest volume hospitals. Adjusted survival was also statistically significantly better (48.5% vs. 43.1%, P < 0.001). For PC, resection rates were also statistically significantly higher (30.1% vs. 12.0%, P < 0.001) with higher adjusted survival (21.5% vs. 19.9%, P = 0.01). We did not find variation in rates of other cancer treatments across hospitals.
Conclusions: A significant association exists between long-term survival and rates of cancer-directed surgery across hospitals, without variation in rates of other therapies. Access to resection appears to be key to reducing variation in long-term survival. J. Surg. Oncol. 2016;113:599-604. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Keywords: clinical oncology; esophageal; neoplasms; pancreatic; radiation oncology; surgery.
© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.